The following is a guest post from Chris Gilchrist, founder of Hit Reach, web design and SEO specialists based in Dundee, Scotland.

Hit Reach have launched a new tool for link builders, the Link Building Toolbar which makes use of Majestic’s OpenApps utility and the Light API in a number of ways and we thought we’d highlight them here to help other developers understand how Majestic can be leveraged.

The Link Building Toolbar has at it’s core has 3 essential functions:

Manage links directly from within your browser - eliminating the need for spreadsheets

Highlighting links in your browser – so you can scan a list of links and see who links to you already

Crawling your links & alerting you to any changes – such as links being made live, changed or deleted

The functionality is then extended via a range of settings, add-ons and integrations. Agencies can even have their own toolbar customised just for them. Some already have:

“Chris and his team approached us to have a play with the Link Building Toolbar before it was publicly released, we jumped at the chance and even had a Skyrocket add-on developed to help us get the most out of the tool. We find it to be indispensable with our client link building campaigns as it helps us to quickly evaluate opportunities and organise them ready to be actioned – this means less legwork and more results for our clients.” James Agate, Founder of Skyrocket SEO.

Tracking Links in Your Browser

The toolbar runs neatly in your browser window and lets you enter information about any URL using a pop up form which eliminates the need to use a spreadsheet for recording information. The form also lets you assign a status to that URL such as Success (you got a link), Pending (you submitted a request for a link), and so on.

(Click on any images throughout for a larger version.)

The next time you visit that site you can see the status of that link (Success, Pending, etc) in the toolbar, and if there’s more than 1 link on the site an ‘Other Links’ box will appear. Clicking that box lists all the pages on the site you have had interactions with and what stage each one is at.

The toolbar includes a button to jump between your projects and other information such as the country location and Google PR, but more importantly it pulls in the new metrics we revealed recently!

Any time you load a page the metrics will be displayed automatically in particular the Citation Flow and Trust Flow Metrics associated with the page. You can roll over them to remind yourself of the name of the Metrics.

To find out more information about that URL you can click that area to reveal more details. There’s also a direct link to the Majestic site to explore that URL in more detail. (If you are logged into Majestic when you do this – and have a subscription, you go straight to the Site Explorer Fresh link detail. [Ed.])

From a users point of view not only does this give them crucial trust information about any URL they are on in real time but it also costs them nothing and they don’t even need to have a Majestic account. It runs completely off Hit Reach’s Majestic account using our incredibly fast and flexible Light API.

PS: Don’t worry if you already have lots of links pointing to your site and don’t want to populate them individually. You can simply import a CSV of your backlinks from your historic Majestic reports!

Highlighting Links in Your Browser

One of the toolbar’s biggest features is it’s ability to highlight all the URL’s on a page that already link to you or that you’ve already approached for a link.

No more searching through project spreadsheets to see if you’ve approached a site before or not. One click of the toggle analysis button is all it takes!

This works by querying your project database to see if a URL already has information storied about it. If it does then the link on the page is highlighted in a different colour based on the status assigned to that URL.

Because the page is queried in real time it means the information is right up to date. If Linkbuilder A adds a status to a URL and Linkbuilder B click toggle analysis 1 second later they will see the URL highlighted. This means whole teams can work on a campaign simultaneously with minimal risk of overlap.

Link builders who use query strings in the SERPS and prospecting tools will be able to imagine how much time this can save each day!

Crawling your links

Hit Reach have built a custom web crawler which not only crawls the page your links were on before to check for changes, it can crawl the whole site. This means they know when a link’s details have changed, like the anchor text or being set to no follow, but they can also tell you when a link has been deleted from Page A or moved to Page B instead.

Very handy in cases where the link was originally on the homepage of a blog but has since been archived for example. But their crawler only checks your existing link database and that’s where Majestic comes in with it’s regularly updated linkscape.

Whilst link building tools have been integrating with Majestic for a long time, what Hit Reach have done is keep their overheads down by avoiding paying for an enterprise license which in turn makes their application pricing low for the end user.

Chris from Hit Reach says “we looked at purchasing an enterprise license but after speaking to our potential customer base we realised a significant number of them already had a Majestic SEO account. As our customers would be funding the cost of our license they’d in effect be paying for Majestic twice which seemed crazy”.

“We decided to utilise Majestic’s OpenApps platform. This allows our customers to connect their Link Building Toolbar to their Majestic account and we use their personal account’s API allowance to retrieve their Fresh Links each month.”

“It was extremely easy to use the Majestic API to achieve to build our OpenApp and the reporting gets done each month in lighting time.”

Hit Reach have demonstrated just how easy it should be for Majestic customers to integrate their account with 3rd parties.